Nokia 808 PureView hands-on

Nokia plan to be kings of mobile imaging and have put great amounts of effort to create the 808 PureView.

Its defining feature is, of course, the 41MP camera sensor, which is certain to excite as much as it will raise many eyebrows. Here's an extensive blog post that explains how the PureView camera works.

Here's the short version: by default, the Nokia 808 PureView shoots 5MP shots but does something called oversampling - 8 pixels from the sensor are combined into a single pixel in the image. This is meant to improve the image quality, but also let you zoom in up to 3x in the photo while keeping the actual resolution and not losing sharpness. You can zoom up to 4x in the 1080p videos that the PureView can record.

Nokia 808 PureView sensor compared in size to a common 8 megapixel cameraphone sensor and a budget 5 megapixel sensor

There are other options for the resolution - 3MP and 8MP - which also allow to zoom in on photos (even after you've taken them), but you can also get almost all the pixels from the sensor and shoot a 38MP photo (that's for 4:3 photos, 16:9 photos go up to 34MP).

A better look at the Nokia 808 PureView's amazing camera

The camera protrudes from the back, just like it did in the N8, but the Nokia 808 PureView is bigger and noticeably thicker than the N8. Part of that is due to the 4" ClearBlack AMOLED display, which really pushes the limits of its nHD (360x640 resolution). The "hump" for the camera is something you'll have to get used to, but people seemed to really appreciate the PureView's design.

A few more shots of the Nokia 808 PureView

Here's what the camera UI looks like:

Nokia 808 PureView camera UI

The Nokia 808 PureView runs the Nokia Belle OS and is the fastest of the Belles - a single-core 1.3GHz processors. It's the fastest, smoothest Belle-running (or Anna, or Symbian, or whatever) phone we've ever handled. See it in action:

We had another meeting with the Nokia 808 PureView. This time around we focused specifically on the camera interface and the cool zooming gesture. We also tried to show you what an image shot at the highest sensitivity setting looks like. Here, see for yourself:

We got hold of two of the other color versions of the Nokia 808 PureView. Here's how the monstrous cameraphone looks in red.